“Real bad music”: the era David Crosby called a musical wasteland
Every generation of rock and roll tends to have peaks and valleys. There’s no way that one style can be at the top forever, and sometimes the biggest artists of all time only need a few months to be considered passe when the next generation comes along. That’s usually when more interesting music starts making its way to the forefront, but David Crosby looked around many of the later generations and began wondering where all of that adventurousness went back in the day.
Then again, expecting any generation of rock and roll to have the same impact it did in the 1960s was bound to be a pipe dream. Anyone who was around during Woodstock was witnessing something that would never happen again, and comparing every subsequent guitar hero to Jimi Hendrix or any songwriter to Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell hardly seemed fair looking back on everything.
That’s not to say that the next generations didn’t have their own sound. Before the decade was even finished, Led Zeppelin was already setting the template for what rock and roll was going to sound like later. Things were bound to get a lot heavier, but even Crosby could admit that there were some true geniuses in the world of jazz rock and fusion, always going back to people like Miles Davis and loving virtually every note that Steely Dan ever put out.
However, around the end of the 1970s, the focus on image started to change. This was the era when the best way to hear about a band was either on the radio or seeing them in concert, so when MTV kicked in, there was a whole new audience looking at the new talent of the day. And now, they also had to worry about what everybody looked like and what they sounded like.
“The ’80s is a great place to start. As a period: a real wasteland. You’re talking about dance music – real bad dance music. The ’80s was not a good time for me.”
David Crosby
While that shouldn’t have been a major issue, the eventual hair metal scene and dance music started to make a mockery of what Crosby’s generation had wanted. There were still people willing to push the envelope, but they seemed far more concerned with how much flash could be put into their music video on MTV than finding that one lost chord no one heard of or making extensions on a musical piece.
Since everything came back to the same backbeat, Crosby felt that he had nothing to be proud of during the peak of MTV, saying, “The ’80s is a great place to start. As a period: a real wasteland. You’re talking about dance music – real bad dance music. The ’80s was not a good time for me because I was completely out of my head on hard drugs. And it really went downhill during the ’80s. A lot of people going down the tubes. A lot of people dying. And disco. I mean, how bad can it get?”.
But for Crosby, there was some light at the end of the tunnel. He had a support team to rely on when he eventually cleaned up, and while American Dream was far from the standards that anyone measured a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young record on, it was more of a statement of survival on Crosby’s part than making a definitive body of work.
The entire 1980s might have been a massive cycle of excess and recovery for Crosby, but by the time the decade ended, getting something more authentic with the grunge revolution may as well have been a blessing from the musical gods. Because if we had to put up with treating hangers-on as legends, rock and roll would have likely begun to fade out before the millennium was finished.
